I got my preorder of Unreal 2 yesterday. I started playing it after work, then on and off until now. I completed it with little effort. It was a gorgeous game in parts, and good fun, but two days?? I suppose I''m used to RPGs that last forever, but even FPSs like NOLF2 took me a week to finish. Shouldn''t game designers maintain the idea that a player may want more than 2 days (not fulltime) of play?

I think it depends on the game; if it is very replayable, I don''t see the problem. For a linear, plot-driven game on the other hand, 2 days would be a bit disappointing.

A game I''m writing, still in it''s early design stages, will probably take only a couple of hours to complete at most - but you can play as one of three different races, and even with the same choice I don''t intend on having the same things happen each time you play it!

Actually, I would like to know what other people think about this concept. If it''s done well, would this diversion from the norm put you off, or appeal to you?

depends how easily amused you are... myself, i usually get bored of games very quick. there are only a handful of games that i''ve actually complete, or perhaps still play... 2 of these include baldur''s gate 1 and 2... i just can''t get enough of them... then again, they aren''t fps''s. so if a game only takes a couple days to finish... fine by me, chances are i won''t pick it up again for awhile anyways.


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Unreal 2 amused me enough to warrant the cost, though I would have enjoyed it 100x more if I had hardware to play it at prettier than 25% detail(or thereabouts I estimate) at 20FPS.

I figure if I get ten hours for a $50 game, I''m happy. I''ll pay $8 for a 2 hour movie at a theatre, and I don''t even get to interact with that.

There are only a few games I''ve really spent lots of time replaying anyways:
Fallout 1/2
Deus Ex
AvP2
Civ3
Alpha Centauri

-This is where the world drops off
-ryan@lecherousjester.com

Alpha Centauri is way too addictive. I had to surgically remove it from my hard drive.

I spent large ammounts of my time on Unreal (one) looking at all the pretty graphics and listening to the music

Most FPS style games take me around two days or less (of good solid playing) to complete. I am pretty good at them, though.

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Maybe playing Unreal 2 just reminds you of playing through all the Half-Life single player mission.... realy, if *I* owned a secret government installation, I wouldn''t have included so many moving elevated platforms and acid-flooded rooms with lines of floating boxes to hop across in the building design -_-

"You TK''ed my chicken!"

that''s why they don''t let you own secret government installations.

Yeah - but HL single player took me two weeks to finish. I agree with wojtos though I love the Baldur''s Gate series - BG2 took me over a month to finish, and I''m still working through IW2. It can be done in a FPS style though - with all its faults, Morrowind took forever to complete the main quest, and you can carry on doing other quests ad infinitum

Depends on what you''re looking for.

Some people want fast paced on-demand action. Others want long term plot and politics. Others are inbetween.

For me, about a month or two is the right longevity for a game. Long enough for it to dig itself into my dreams, short enough to allow for other games to come along.

I have about ten hours a week (on good weeks!) that I can devote to games. This means that if a game takes several hundred hours to finish, it''s eating up a huge chunk of my life, and unless it''s amazing, I''m going to resent it. But if it takes four hours.. I''m feeling gypped.

I recall "Loom" being disappointing. It was one of the first truly good puzzle-style games.. but I solved it in under three hours. For $40??? And it was the same game, regardless. On the other side, I found Wizards&Warriors to be waaaaaay tooooo ssslllooooowwww. I put in my time for about six months before finaly defeating it, and it felt like a hollow victory, for I had missed out on a number of other games -- but couldn''t put down the one I had put so much time into. (who can tell how close the ending is?)

But these were radical examples. On the other extremes I played Rama (a puzzle-based game, heavy on math) about five years back. Even though the ending was horrific (and timed!), the whole esperience was positive, even though it took my SO and I three months to get to the end. Because of the horrible ending we never finished it, but it was *still* fun. And one of my faves is Machiavelli, where a good "30 year" game takes 3-4 hours to play. It''s still on my hard drive, even though I have to take arcane steps to run it under current OSes.

Good games can be short but still have replayability... not meaning that longer games are necessarily better or worse!